


all is

by barbariccia



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: F/M, Religious Discussion, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:36:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27473626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barbariccia/pseuds/barbariccia
Summary: “If I’d known all your affections required was something so simple as a gift, I’d have been out picking flowers a lot sooner.”Whither do the gods lead us, and what awaits us at the end?
Relationships: Cirina Mol/Hien Rijin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	all is

A cloud passes over the sun as Cirina asks, quite simply, “Would you tell me about your kami?”

Doma’s fall shows in the weary bend of Hien’s spine after a half-day’s easy work, in every deep breath he tries to disguise with sighs and yawns and the exultant spread of his arms when he regards the Steppe. His recovery has been steady, if slow, and if they break more often than not for his sake, neither of them call attention to it.

Today they are free of chores, and the weather is pleasant, perfect for cloud-watching and friendly conversation. There is even a box of fruit to share, it being the season for _guzeelzgene_ , and Temulun-khatun herself had helped pick them only yesterday. Hien had been overjoyed to see them, let alone be given the box to bring along, and now sits stuffing them as politely as he can manage into his mouth.

Already there is a sizable pile of strawberry tops by his side. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” Cirina says, and takes another for herself. It’s so sweet, her toes curl in her boots. “I’ve wondered about them since you first mentioned them, but I know nothing more than they _exist_.”

Hien smiles, and leans back upon the grass with a quiet grunt, the better to watch the sky. Cirina follows suit. “... Well,” he starts slowly, like he’s not sure where to begin. “They’re everywhere, in every _thing_. Every blade of grass, and each sigh of the wind.”

There’s a flower by his cheek. Cirina reaches out to pluck it before he can turn and crush it, and cannot help but notice his mouth is stained pink with berry juice. “Everything?” she asks, and he looks toward her then. The broken stalk bends beneath his cheek, and the flower, safe, twirls between Cirina’s fingers.

“ _Most_ everything,” he agrees easily. “Not in the things men make for themselves. They created the world and live in it as we do, though we can no more see them as we can see the backs of our heads. We respect and honour the world they made, and in turn they do not strike us down when we must use their creations.”

He laughs when Cirina’s nose wrinkles. “I know,” he says, still looking at her, no trace of any displeasure in his expression. “But it’s benign, all things considered. If we must use wood, we thank the kami for providing it. I think them not unlike your elder gods, if harder to listen to.”

Cirina holds the flower up to better look at it, envious suddenly of its simple - if short - life. “ _I_ can’t listen to them,” she says. Her cheeks heat up at how petulant she sounds. “Not many can. Only the _udgan_ , and they say the words can be unclear on the best of days.”

Not even for a second does his mood falter. “Ah, but we are the same!” He reaches out to pluck the safflower from her, smiling as he does so. “You call your listeners _udgan_ ; we call ours _wū_ , and the art of listening takes a lifetime to learn. Or so I’m told.” he taps the flower against his nose once, twice, and then reaches over to tuck it into the crook of Cirina’s horn. “I could puzzle out the kami’s intentions just as well as I could stride into Garlemald right now and proclaim myself emperor.”

Cirina’s cheeks are hot, and she keeps her eyes trained carefully upward. She could lay here until they both grew old or cold, whichever came first, with only the sky as their witness - but now prompted, Hien is full of questions. “What do your elder gods say, anyway? I have had the great honour of watching your khatun listen so intently to what I can only divine as silence, but whatever their words, I cannot imagine them as great and terrible as _respect us or suffer misfortune_. Surely the message would grow old after a while, no?”

This time when Cirina scrunches her face up he laughs, and she lets herself watch. He’s handsome like this, mirth at the fore, head thrown back and shoulders shaking.

He quiets to listen, at least. “Temulun-khatun doesn’t share every whisper with us,” she says. A fly buzzes just out of sight; she swats at it without looking. “But they dictate every last thing we do, from dinner to where we make our home. I trust them,” she adds, hastily, “But we are simply pieces moved at their whims, and who are we to know what games they play?”

A breeze whistles by as she falls silent, as though answering her in a language she’ll never understand. Silent and almost melancholy, Cirina doesn’t notice Hien moving at first. 

It’s the wince that grabs her attention. It _is_ somewhat colder now they’re at rest, and he must ache something terrible. It hasn’t been long at all since they found him broken and bleeding under the sky. Still, he waves off her concern with a smile that does not begin to hint at how pained he might be, and takes a moment to stretch his leg, turning it this way and that, slowly. Satisfied to his design, he sits up and leans over, toward Cirina, who is at first confused and then startled when he leans ever closer, hand outstretched—

But his sights are set further afield than her, and he reaches past her. When she turns she sees more of the same flowers she’d rescued from a crushing beneath his careless movements. In her chest, her heart hammers away like a war drum.

Something of her shock must show on her face, for he laughs more than a little sheepishly when he looks at her. “Ah, sorry,” he says. His cheeks are the colour of the fruit they’d shared. “I thought - well, the one in your horn suits you, so…”

Normally chatty, Hien tapers off into embarrassed silence as he picks the last of the flowers and gathers them all into his lap. Eager to turn her attention away from the growing awkwardness, Cirina swats at the air again as though still plagued by insects, and watches the horizon instead.

Beside her, the deposed prince works at… something. She does not mean to watch, but curiosity quickly gets the better of her, and when she looks she cannot help but smile. He works methodically, pressing his thumbnail through the stems of each flower and pushing them through, one at a time, to make an unbroken circle, over and over, until…

It’s anemic at best, but he still blushes when he holds the offering out to her. “It was too much to hope for enough for a crown,” he explains, and Cirina only smiles, bemused. He reaches for her hand and she gives it to him easy enough; with a gentle hand he pushes the sleeve of her coat up, and pushes the flower bracelet onto her wrist. “I hope it is to your liking.”

Cirina kisses him with enough force that he falls back, grunting when his back meets the earth. As lovely as his sounds are, she recognises it as _pained_ , and pulls back immediately.

“Oh,” she says, worry coiling in her gut like eels, “Oh, Hien, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think-”

He doesn’t answer right away, but he smiles all the same. “If I’d known all your affections required was something so simple as a gift, I’d have been out picking flowers a lot sooner.”

Cirina’s laugh is too loud, shocked, but the sound of it seems to hearten Hien all the same. He relaxes, pains forgotten, and in that moment she makes a decision. When she kisses him again, he melts like ghee beneath her, happy to follow her lead. Every kiss is slow and sure and steady, and all too quickly does she lose track of time. Nothing is more important than this.

“Did your gods whisper to you?” he whispers as they break apart, voice hoarse. The sound curls comfortably in Cirina’s belly, and she laughs, and then she is kissing him again, unable to help herself. He is warm and he is willing, and when he makes another gentle noise into her mouth, her heart jumps hard enough she feels it all the way in her toes.

“If they did, I don’t know that they’d tell me to kiss you and be done with it.”

Silence once more, yawning between them like the greatest chasm Cirina could ever dream up. She thinks, with cheeks so hot they might as well be glowing, that she has overstepped at long last. Not even Hien’s smile is enough to fully temper that fear. “I- I’m sorry, that was-”

“It is far too easy to forget how bold you are beneath your gentle face,” he says, and lifts a hand to cup her cheek. He’s almost _too_ warm; she’s like to start spewing smoke at this rate. “Your gods don’t… demand your innocence?”

Confused for a moment, Cirina can only blink until she understands his meaning. Her laughter is sudden and wild. “Your _innocence_ has no place here,” she tells him, and pulls away to sit up. The world around them is vast and rugged: she closes her eyes, the better to feel the wind on her face and hear the cries of yol far afield. “Mother Nhaama and Father Azim rutted where they pleased when their war ended,” she adds. Untying her deel is the simplest thing in the world; beneath it, she’s naked. “And I am blood of their blood. I am of the steppe. Why should I not follow their example?”

She watches him when she shrugs the coat off, arms spread to enjoy the feel of the wind, nipples pricking up in the breeze. Beneath her, Hien looks dazed, laid low beneath her might. She feels half a god herself. “Unless your kami forbid it,” she says with a smile, and reaches for his hands. The safflower bracelet dangles from her wrist as she takes his hands and presses them against her skin.

He’s gone red, as virginal as any unpractised maid. “I, ah, no,” he stutters, and Cirina is filled with a fierce burst of affection. He does not care to hold her breasts, instead sliding his hands a little lower to rest against her ribs, and the dark scales that pattern there. “No, that- Doma encourages her kings to take lovers. As- as many as they please.” he looks down, gaze unfocused against her belly, and that affection turns quickly into something dull and concerned. Does he miss that unknown ideal? Had he indulged as prince already? Is she reminding him of all he’d lost in the Rebellion? “They say the more partners one takes, the longer one lives,” he adds, and the absurdity of it has Cirina needing to press her lips tightly closed until the urge to laugh passes.

Her fears are not worth bringing up. “Will you let me sheathe you?” she asks instead, and cannot read his eyes when he looks up at her. “I won’t be offended if you say-”

“Yes. Please.”

Recovering as he is, he’s unfit for the robes-and-armour he’d been discovered dying in, and spends his days now in Xaela dress. Peeling him out of the second skin is easy enough, and then he is bare beneath her, strange and wild as she must still be to him. Where there ought to be scales there is hair, and nothing hides his manhood from the world. She’s eager to touch, but must first kick off her ömd eagerly, tossing them to rest with the deel.

Hien’s injuries have healed magnificently, though they have left some uncomfortable looking scars in their wake, and he jolts as she puts her hands on him. “I’m sorry - did I hurt you?”

“Not at all,” he says gently, and covers her hand with his. She can _feel_ him growing beneath her touch. “Your fingers are cold from the wind, is all. Um…”

She waits for him to finish his thought, fingers swirling in his hair idly. It’s coarse, but not unpleasant. “... Don’t put your full weight on me,” he says, and the request is benign for his embarrassment. “My hip-”

“Of course.”

He needn’t ask for tenderness, for Cirina is not cruel, but she smiles at him anyway, and goes to kiss him once more. His mouth is open when they meet, and for as sure as he is at kissing, he does not seem to know what to do with his spare hand. It hovers nervously for a moment before his fingertips come to rest delicately against her knee, and then it takes off again, as flighty as a dragonfly, finding a home instead on the scales of her thigh. When she grasps his cock firmly she feels it stiffen - from just a simple touch! - and when she guides it to slide against the tough, dark scales protecting her cunt, it twitches.

If she thought him cute before, she does so doubly now when she gets him in. Both hands tighten where they rest, and he groans. She goes slow for his benefit, his prick different in feel to the few she’s had before. It’s strange in shape, wider and blunter than any Xaela she’s known, but it feels just as comfortably, goes just as deep, and he makes the same noises when she clenches tight around him.

It’s those same noises that encourage her on, slow and gentle as she can bear to be. Wet as the great khaal river, the sound of their lovemaking is swallowed up by the great blue sky, as is Hien’s whispered apology when he grabs a little too tight. She does laugh, then, and can’t help but grind a little firmer against him. Not once does he complain, and for that she is thankful: she cannot stop now, not when he slides home again and again, not when her tail lifts, shaky in anticipation, not when she gasps aloud and her eyes flutter shut-

Cirina finds herself on the edge of a great precipice, her only desire to fall either side, every movement drawing noise from her throat, and as Hien’s cock bumps somewhere so deep it aches she realises she cannot make it by herself. As lost as she is, she must make a noise, though she hears nothing, and can only rock breathlessly against him, wanting, _wanting_.

Broad and warm, Hien’s fingers tease against her, searching for something to rub at, and when he reaches his goal she _does_ hear the cry she makes. “ _There_ ,” she calls, voice cracking. He neither speeds up nor slows down, letting her chase her goal herself, and it doesn’t take long before the feeling flashes sudden and bright within her. She comes without a single sound.

The gods might think of her as a piece to move in their endless games and schemes, but if this is the path she is meant to walk upon, Cirina can forgive them their machinations. Beneath her, Hien is warm as summer dusk, as radiant as the coming dawn, a humble supplicant.

“Once more, _tiánxīn_ , for me.”


End file.
